Thu, Oct 31, 2024 page7

• Tour de France ‘comes home’ as route unveiled

  • AFP, PARIS
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  Next year’s Tour de France is to be raced exclusively in France for the first time since the 2020 COVID-19 edition with the 21 stages including two time trials, a blockbuster final week in the Alps and a return to the finale on the Champs-Elysees.

  After successive starts outside France, in Copenhagen in 2022, Bilbao last year and Florence this year, next year’s “Grand Depart” is in the northern French city of Lille.

  “We decided to bring the Tour home, it was high time after all the foreign starts,” race director Christian Prudhomme said.

  

  Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme poses in front of the route and stages of next year’s edition after its official unveiling in Paris on Tuesday.

  Photo: AFP

  Entirely absent from this year’s route due to the Paris Olympics, next year’s edition has eight stages in the north and west, and ends with eight laps along the cobbles of the Champs-Elysees.

  The Olympics enjoyed a huge success with a long, arduous road race around Paris, but organizers said it was too soon for the Tour to attempt that.

  “We are in talks with the city hall and the police about the possibility of doing that some time,” Prudhomme said.

  A fierce struggle for the first yellow jersey accorded to the overall race leader would be decided on a 185km race around Lille. Fans from across the border in Belgium can support a potential winner in double Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel, who finished third in this year’s Tour.

  “Evenepoel proved last year he is also a man of the Tour, and we expect him to be active this year, too,” Prudhomme said.

  The three-week extravaganza visits the northern ports of Dunkirk and Boulogne before heading to Caen where a time trial would pay homage to those who fell in the 1944 Battle of Normandy which largely destroyed the city.

  Organizers were keen to explain the first week was tough.

  “A week in the plains is not the joy ride it was in the old days,” Prudhomme said. “We have cut the sprint stages and laid traps everywhere.”

  The race also makes a rare incursion into Brittany, visiting Saint Malo.

  That stage ends on the short steep climb on the Mur-de-Bretagne where in 2021 Mathieu van der Poel, the grandson of Raymond Poulidor — 12 times on the podium, but never a winner or leader of the Tour — avenged the family debt.

  “We need stages like this, going back over legendary ground so that children can dream of the Tour as we once did,” Prudhomme said.

  Wine lovers would spot Chinon on stage 10, and the Rhone Valley on stage 17, but there is no Burgundy, Bordeaux or Champagne on the map at all.

  Tradition holds that the Tour de France is won and lost in the Alps and this edition has been stacked with mountains in the third week.

  The first mountains come as late as stage 10 in the massive Central on July 14, France’s national holiday.

  A day off in Toulouse on stage 11 is followed by three blockbuster climb stages in the Pyrenees, then three more in the last week in the Alps with a plethora of legendary Tour mountains on the menu.

  Defending champion Tadej Pogacar has proven too hot to handle in stages with a single mountain, but is beatable where there are four or five, especially in the heat.

  After being beaten into second twice by Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard, Pogacar towered above the Tour this year, winning six stages in a crushing triumph

  Evenepoel won the white jersey for best young rider in his first Tour and has promised to show up next year better primed for climbing after focusing on his triumphant Olympics.
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